


The Days Are The Hardest

by DianaSolaris



Category: The Inheritance Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Family Feels, Family Issues, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Non-Graphic Violence, Present Tense, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 10:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17078873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DianaSolaris/pseuds/DianaSolaris
Summary: The days are the hardest - for their own reasons. Zhakkarn focus, both pre-canon and post-the first book.





	The Days Are The Hardest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadowlover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowlover/gifts).



                The days are the hardest.

                Sieh doesn’t know how to care for living things. He loves them, sure. But no child has ever taken good care of his toys, and Zhakkarn watches him fumble around Nahadoth’s daytime shell with an awkwardness she’s never seen before. None of them like this, but they will have to adjust. This is the choice they made, by defending their mother, by avenging her. By remembering her.

                Her biggest challenge is holding back. The Arameri like to ask her to dance, spar with them in some sort of foolhardy dare, and she is not allowed to kill them unless they give her permission. But ‘not allowed’ is a very different thing from being able to, and this is Itempas’s personal curse on her; she has to restrain every blow, every attack, to make sure that the precious Arameri blood is not spilled. It doesn’t mean she makes it easy on them, though; she loves to make them dance, get them dodging and weaving and panicking until she can see the fear in their beady, soulless eyes. Let them think, just for a moment, that she might break her promise! It is – almost – as good as watching them bleed.

                The days are the hardest.

                Kurue, in many ways, is the most fortunate of them; she enjoys keeping the library and her wisdom is hard to twist. She knows how to be patient. She knows how to be quiet. But she is forbidden from spreading her wings, and the Arameri use her as a toy just as much as anybody else. Zhakkarn offers to kill one of her “lovers” for her; Kurue just shakes her head and says,  _that would be unwise._

\---

Four Enefadeh. There could have been more, but the godlings took their sides and were too afraid of their bright father to go against him. Sometimes Zhakkarn regrets it; other times, she remembers the look on her mother’s face and the gentle touch of her hand and the anger rushes up inside her as white-hot as it had ever been.

                Zhakkarn had children, too. All of them betrayed her.

                (She can’t remember what Kurue’s godlings decided. Only that they are not here – an absence which speaks volumes.)

                Sieh has never been a father, until now. Now he has to mind his own parent, just for long enough, just while the shell tries to catch up to the unimaginable, maelstrom-birthed being underneath the skin. Just. Just.

                (Years were shorter when they had the liberty of not caring. Now they count their servitude away by the lives of their masters. Arameri scum.)

                The daytime atrocity that Nahadoth is bound into is Itempas’s little joke; a being made of clay with a word of god slipped under its tongue. A prison, a promise. He’s never made them promise not to hurt the clay, though, and on days when Zhakkarn has had _enough,_ when she wants to strangle the life out of every Arameri in Sky, she likes to make the horrid thing bleed. It doesn’t sound like her father. It doesn’t cry like her father.

                Soon enough, though, even that just feels like cruelty instead of war. Like she is becoming an Arameri of her own.

                One day, she sits down by the clay thing, the shell, and it looks back at her with eyes that seem to understand more than it lets on. “What am I?” it asks.

                Even Kurue has no answer, yet.

                The days are the hardest.

                At night, though, Nahadoth wakes up and remembers who he is, truly. He sheds his shell into dust and trailing mist and sews the chains of flesh and bone into his cloak. After the twilight murkiness passes, he spreads his darkness over them and whispers pretty lies into their dreams.  _One day, Enefa will come home._

It could be true.

_One day this will be over._

                One way or another.

_One day we will kill them all._

                One day, one day, one day – is this why mortals turned the gods into fairytales?-

_One day we will be free._

\---

                The days are the hardest.

                They don’t spend much time together anymore, now that they’re not forced to; Zhakkarn loves him, she does, like a son and a brother and a father all at once, but the god of childhood and the goddess of war had little in common other than captivity and grief.

                Most of the time, she’ll admit, she doesn’t think about it anymore. But at midday, when the sun is the brightest, she can’t help but flinch and wait. Feel his eyes boring down at her, still judging her for the sin she won’t repent. Loving your mother is a sin, by His word.

                That’s how she finds Sieh – staring straight up into the bright sunlight, the heat making tears well up at the edges of his eyes, the shade of the great tree only a few steps behind him. He could get away, if he wanted. He doesn’t.

                The other godlings don’t understand. But she does. She stands next to him in the light, and stares up at the burning sun.

                “Do you think he’ll ever change?”

                Sieh snorts. “Of course he won’t. It’s not in his nature. That’d be like asking Nahadoth to settle down.”

                “I suppose.”

                “You disagree?”

                Zhakkarn shrugs. Perhaps she’s being foolish. She likes to believe that there’s hope – that the legacy of their family won’t forever be one tainted by sadness and anger and rage. “I want to.”

                Sieh exhales. Then, in a voice so small she can hardly believe it belongs to a god, he says, “Nahadoth never has time for me anymore. And neither does Yeine.”

                There’s all sorts of things Kurue could tell him. That they’re busy fixing the world that Itempas and the Arameri broke. That Yeine is still new to divinity, and that she doesn’t know how much Sieh needs her. That it will be okay in the end.

                Instead, she puts her hand on his shoulder.

                “This is freedom, Sieh. Enjoy it.”

                He’s still crying, she notices. She’s not sure he knows it.

                _One day, this will be over. One day, Enefa will come home. One day, we will be free._

               

 


End file.
